A device can typically include one or more graphics processing units (GPU) that are used to process graphics or general purpose operations for the device. Each of the GPUs is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display. For example, the GPU can be used to transcode video, render graphics for a user interface (UI), video encoding/decoding, OpenCL, etc.
Each of these GPU operations will cause the device to consume power that leads to heat being generated by the device. This generated heat can add to the to a thermal load being applied to the device. An excessive thermal load can affect the device performance and, in extreme cases, can lead to a device shutdown. Existing devices can mitigate the thermal load by reducing the GPU operating frequency globally for all processes, regardless of whether the GPU operations are for a batch process or a process supporting a user interface operation.